Implementing Ad Support Into Your Site With PHPAdsNew - What is PhpAdsNew?

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In my opinion, it is the best ad management system on the Internet. I am a little bias however, because I love open source software, so here’s the "official" description, as seen on the PhpAdsNew page:

"phpAdsNew is a banner management and tracking system written in PHP. Currently it can manage multiple banners (any size) per advertiser, view daily, overall and summary statistics and send statistics to advertisers via email."

I think that description pretty much says it all. At the time of writing this article, PhpAdsNew was in mature development stage, was OS independent, and had a 99.8656% activity percentile on SourceForge, which means that it's one of SourceForge's most popular downloads... and with good reason! PhpAdsNew is maintained by a team of 9 developers from around the world.

The current release of PhpAdsNew is version 2 beta 6.1, which you can download here. Grab either the tar (262k) or zip (378k) version, and extract it into a folder on your web server. By default, the folder will be called something like PhpAdsNew_2.61, but rename it to PhpAdsNew.

Next off we need to configure the details of our database. Open the config.inc.php file in your PhpAdsNew directory and look for the following lines at the top of the file:

/*********************************************************/
/* Database configuration */
/*********************************************************/

// MySQL hostname
$phpAds_hostname = "localhost";

// MySQL username
$phpAds_mysqluser = "mysqlusername";

// MySQL password
$phpAds_mysqlpassword = "mysqlpassword";

// The database phpAdsNew lives in
$phpAds_db = "phpads";

You should change the variables shown above to match the details of your web server where MySQL is installed. For the $phpAds_db variable, a database with that name must exist on your MySQL server before PhpAdsNew will work, so fire up the MySQL console application and enter the following:

create database phpads;
exit;

Next, find the administrator configuration section in config.inc.php and change the value of $phpAds_admin, which is the username we will use shortly to login to PhpAdsNew. You should also change $phpAds_admin_pw to a suitable password.

Lastly, modify the variables under the phpAdsNew configuration section. Save config.inc.php and visit http://yourserver/phpadsnew in your web browser. Obviously, you need to replace "yourserver" in the web address above with either the name or IP address of the web server onto which you installed PhpAdsNew.

Now that we've created our PhpAdsNew database, we need to import the table structures for it, which can be found in all.sql in PhpAdsNew's main directory. Jump onto your MySQL server and import the contents of all.sql, like this:

mysql -uadmin -ppassword phpads < c:\phpadsnew\all.sql

I've installed PhpAdsNew on my Windows 2000 server running Apache, so obviously if you're running Linux, then you'll need to change the path to all.sql. MySQL should respond with a blank line. If you get any errors, double check your login credentials as well as the name of your database and where you're telling MySQL to find all.sql.

Now, load PhpAdsNew in your browser. I installed it locally on my web server, so I loaded up http://localhost/phpadsnew. Here's what it looked like:



Enter the values for the user and password that you specified in the config.inc.php file and click on the login button. The PhpAdsNew stats screen will load:

Next: Using PhpAdsNew >>
 

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